Month: November 2017

CNN: Far-fetched fixes for climate change, from solar shields to air-scrubbing

“In the battle against climate change, efforts to reduce emissions of harmful gases like carbon dioxide have consumed most of the headlines. But many scientists say that simply minimizing man-made pollution is not enough to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, as agreed in the 2015 Paris climate agreement — humans must also devise other means to help cool the planet. There’s no shortage of imaginative proposals to achieve this goal. Some involve sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere; others, including a giant space-based solar shield, would reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth.”

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Reuters: Games offer familiar structures designed to allow us to play with the unfamiliar and rethink what is possible

“At a 2017 conference in Berlin, a dice-based game session explored potential governance mechanisms for geoengineering, the potential manipulation of the global climate by spreading sulphur in the stratosphere to block sunlight and cool the planet. When one participant tried to alter the climate, a remarkable range of reactions emerged from other individuals and teams -– from silent endorsement to self-sacrifice and even threat of nuclear war.”

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Jackson, R. B.; et al. (2017): Focus on negative emissions

Jackson, R. B.; Canadell, J. G.; Fuss, S.; Milne, J.; Nakicenovic, N.; Tavoni, M. (2017): Focus on negative emissions. In Environ. Res. Lett. 12 (11), p.[nbsp]110201. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aa94ff.

” One option increasingly invoked in integrated assessment models (IAMs) is negative emissions, defined as the net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. Two of the most commonly proposed alternatives are biomass energy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS) and direct air capture (DAC). However, little is known about the global potential of emerging and future negative emissions technologies, the sustainability and cost of large-scale deployment needed to meet “safe” climate stabilization targets, and the carbon-climate feedbacks of entering a new carbon-negative world. These knowledge-gaps are the focus of the proposed special issue: […]”

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Geden, Oliver; Löschel, Andreas (2017): Define limits for temperature overshoot targets

Geden, Oliver; Löschel, Andreas (2017): Define limits for temperature overshoot targets. In Nature Geosci 6, p.[nbsp]827. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-017-0026-z.

“Temperature overshoot scenarios that make the 1.5[nbsp]°C climate target feasible could turn into sources of political flexibility. Climate scientists must provide clear constraints on overshoot magnitude, duration and timing, to ensure accountability.”

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Bioenergy Insight: Bioenergy combined with CCS will help UK to transition to low-carbon energy economy, expert says

“Bioenergy technologies combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS) can play a significant role in the UK’s future UK energy system, according to Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) strategy manager for bioenergy Hannah Evans. The[nbsp]ETI[nbsp]is a UK-based company formed from global industries and the UK government. It was formed in 2007, but its programme is officially ending at the end of this year.”

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CEC17: Opening Event (Video)

“Due to the limited success of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, climate engineering (CE) has been increasingly studied in recent years. Often defined as intentional, large-scale interventions in the global climate to counteract some of the effects of climate change, climate engineering techniques continue to be the subject of contentious debate in different in political, scientific and cultural fora. Following the success of the first large international conference on climate engineering in 2014, the IASS and its partners hosted the Climate Engineering Conference 2017: Critical Global Discussions – in Berlin from 9 to 12 October 2017.”

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Dooley, Kate; Kartha, Sivan (2017): Land-based negative emissions. Risks for climate mitigation and impacts on sustainable development

Dooley, Kate; Kartha, Sivan (2017): Land-based negative emissions. Risks for climate mitigation and impacts on sustainable development. In Int Environ Agreements 354 (13), p.[nbsp]182. DOI: 10.1007/s10784-017-9382-9.

“We argue that this is two to three times greater than the amount of land-based NETs that can be realistically assumed, given critical social objectives and ecological constraints. Embarking on a pathway that assumes unrealistically large amounts of future NETs could lead society to set near-term targets that are too lenient and thus greatly overshoot the carbon budget, without a way to undo the damage. Pathways consistent with 1.5[nbsp]°C that rely on smaller amounts of NETs, however, could prove viable. This paper presents a framework for assessing the risks associated with negative emissions in the context of equity and sustainable development.”

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